Faith & Spirit Quote by Paul Tillich

Tillich takes the religious experience most people try to hide - doubt - and treats it as the trapdoor into faith rather than its failure. "The courage to be" isn’t pep-talk bravery; it’s existential nerve, the willingness to keep existing with a self intact when meaning feels evacuated. He roots that courage in a God who "appears" precisely when the familiar God has "disappeared" - a deliberately paradoxical move that signals his larger project: rescuing theology from the brittle, Sunday-school deity who collapses under modern scrutiny.

The line’s engine is its reversal of expectation. If God vanishes in the "anxiety of doubt", the standard narrative is loss: belief erodes, certainty wins, the story ends in secularism or despair. Tillich suggests the opposite: the disappearance is the condition for a deeper encounter. Subtext: the God worth believing in cannot be the same God you can confidently point to, defend, or use as an anxiety-management technique. When certainty breaks, what shows up isn’t a replacement doctrine but what Tillich elsewhere calls the "ground of being" - less a supernatural actor than the depth dimension of reality that sustains you when your concepts fail.

Context matters. Writing in the shadow of two world wars and amid the rise of psychoanalysis and modern skepticism, Tillich is addressing a generation for whom naive faith feels dishonest. He offers an intellectually rigorous permission slip: doubt is not betrayal; it’s the honest price of taking both God and modern consciousness seriously. Courage, here, is spiritual adulthood.